Working Better Less

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“Productivity” is the defense offered up by proponents of artificially extended work weeks. “Sure, you can do the same job in less time,” they say, “but now you can get more work done with the time you have leftover!” That’s awesome, certainly for the employer, and to a degree for the employee as well, I guess. If advancement is the result of mastering a set of competencies, then getting more experience within a given unit of time would theoretically lead to more rapid advancement. That’s fine, but as I noted a couple of weeks ago, “increased productivity” is just a fancy way of saying you’re able (and willing) to do a given task for a progressively cheaper fee. Again, your success depends on how much work you’re willing to do for free.

Essentially, being more productive gives you better “value” for your employer. Now, I’m not saying that employees should endeavor to be poor values, either — the economy depends on thriving companies as much as employees do. But, where’s the benefit to you in proactively developing a better value, particularly in the form of working extra hours that no one may have even asked for in the first place?

The counterargument to the productivity paradox is the notion of “pay for performance,” which is in theory a positive thing: If I make more widgets, or at least make the same widgets better, then I see a change to the good in my compensation. There are two problems with this: One, doing so undercuts the benefits of productivity — if I proportionally reward an employee for being able to do more in less time, have I realized any economic benefit? Two, it’s an easy thing to say, but it’s a difficult thing to implement when we’re talking about applying quantitative value to what is often qualitative work.

Face it — most of us aren’t producing widgets for a living. Even though every company I’ve worked for has preached the virtue of working “smarter, not harder,” at no point would anyone ever be allowed to knock off after 20 hours were they to work particularly smart that week. If I’m going to work 50 hours anyway, I guess I might as well make them dumb hours. It’s a clever ploy — promise pay for performance, and then actively disincentivize performance.

Unfortunately, this will never change in the foreseeable future. For one thing, it would be a financial disaster: Imagine the response of investors were a company to announce that thanks to increased efficiencies, they were going to continue to pay employees the same salaries to produce the same output, only they were cutting the workweek in half. It would be bedlam, with investors instantly devaluing the company, wondering why they were leaving all those “productive” hours on the table.